Theoretical investigation of moiré patterns in quantum images

Abstract

Moiré patterns are produced when two periodic structures with different spatial frequencies are superposed. The transmission of the resulting structure gives rise to spatial beatings which are called moiré fringes. In classical optics, the interest in moiré fringes comes from the fact that the spatial beating given by the frequency difference gives information about details(high spatial frequency) of a given spatial structure. We show that moiré fringes can also arise in the spatial distribution of the coincidence count rate of twin photons from the parametric down-conversion, when spatial structures with different frequencies are placed in the path of each one of the twin beams. In other words,we demonstrate how moiré fringes can arise from quantum images.